Welcome Crankshaft,
You will find that we are all happy to see you here and since the topic turned into a rant and rebuttal I felt obligated to put in my 2 cents worth. Many of us here have been in the industry since tin cans and strings. Some others were around when communications was accomplished by banging rocks together.
I started in Interconnect and moved through Long Distance, Transport, Translations, and CLEC. I can feel your pain too! When I see trouble on a T1 it is usually in provisioning or a channel bank. When it is provisioning the on site technician seldom has a clue what it takes to get it right. We as vendors are often passed on excuses by technicians to a customer and are just obligated to make things work. And as John stated, the pain of billing a customer for whatever time we spend.
I do remember what it was like to report a trouble precisely and have a 99% chance of getting it fixed on the initial report. Now most of the field techs that did that work were forced into early retirement and we have carrier meets (I don't call it vendor anymore.) with an arsenal of test equipment (with the CLEC and LEC both when it's POTS.) to prove trouble and bill the customer again or eat some (or all) of the cost to keep a happy customer.
I'm making that last statement in defense of ALL members here and welcome more like Crankshaft to join us! We could go down in history if that were to happen!
